Google is moving forward with its autonomous vehicle efforts: Austin is now the first city outside of Google's Mountain View homebase to test fully self-driving cars.
The company has already been testing its self-driving Lexus RX450h SUVs in Austin for a couple of months now, and now Google will start testing its first fully-self driving prototype vehicles in the city.
"Our testing fleet includes both modified Lexus SUVs and new prototype vehicles that are designed from the ground up to be fully self-driving," Google said.
The fully self-driving cars should arrive in the city next week. The new prototypes will still have safety drivers aboard for now, but in the next few weeks, they will roam the streets of Austin without drivers.
Google has equipped its prototype cars with sensory technology that allows the vehicle to be aware of its surroundings for a range of up to a football field, to know when it's at a red or a green light, when cyclists are riding close by, when a lane closes ahead and so on.
Google still has plenty of kinks to iron out, but the cars will improve over time and learn to predict how objects around them move. Google's current cars apparently get confused by bikes, but the company should sort this out pretty soon.
Google announced its plans to deploy the fully self-driving cars in Austin at a press conference at the Thinkery, SiliconHillsNews reports. As previously mentioned, Austin is the first city outside of Mountain View, California to test the prototype vehicles, which means that Google will have new challenges to face. Mountain View has vertical streetlights, whereas Austin has horizontal ones and Google's prototype cars will have to adjust to such differences.
It's still an uphill road ahead, but the technology is advancing and is expected to progress even further with new tests, test locations and necessary adjustments. Google's new tests in Austin mark an important milestone in the company's autonomous vehicle endeavors, which should help it learn more about potential challenges and how to avoid them. That said, it's still going to be a good while before self-driving cars are completely prepared to cruise the streets outside of test programs.
